12/09/2011

xTx’s Normally Special is a collection of the painful stories women tell themselves to make it OK for the stories to have happened in the first place. Each story is an open secret. The kind strangers will read right off your face. When I was little, I begged my parents to buy me a diary.…

11/13/2011

— xTx, “Because I Am Not a Monster” I cajoled my way into this write-up; my self-promotional skills are both effective and shameless. I wanted to write about Normally Special, the short story collection by xTx. When granted to me after much cajoling [re: harassment], I stalled, contemplating the task. I dislike book reviews which…

11/02/2011

Some books are a surprise. Some books come at you like a bullet out of nowhere striking through some core part of your brain where you store vital information. Vital feelings. Normally Special by xTx is one such case. For whatever reason it took me a while to get sucked into the universe of xTx.…

10/18/2011

“I’m a mess. Dirty, like he said. I’m feeling every bit of being a woman. I resent the weakness of my sex.” From Normally Special by xTx. Where would you like to begin? With the good news or bad? Bad news is more girls have read Twilight than Normally Special. Good news is if you’re…

10/13/2011

Where did the name xTx come from? It is a shortened form of a longer name I used to blog under. It is the alphabetic version of a dick and balls. It is the stupidest pseudonym ever. It is a fortunate mistake. It is a shield. Why do you call your pen name a “fortunate…

10/08/2011

When I was a little girl, my father told me many times that he believed there was true evil in the world. It wasn’t until years later that I fully understood him, that I knew people could be evil, would be evil, would do evil things. The backbone of xTx’s “The Mill Pond,” a story…

09/22/2011

xTx likes to send me all the great reviews of her book and I yawn, mostly. She thinks I do that because I am not supportive, but it is because nobody is going to tell me something I already know about Normally Special, a book that I am deeply invested in. Disclaimers: I read early…

09/04/2011

When I first started getting to know xTx, I thought she was a nun. There had to be a powerful reason why she wouldn’t put her name to her writing. Service to God seemed like a reasonable explanation. xTx is not a nun. I don’t care who xTx really is. Her pseudonym is the least…